How to automatically track when a bit.ly link has been clicked x times

Question

I'm looking into running a promotion where users who tweet a custom bit.ly (or any other url link service) link and have that link clicked by others x times (say, 3 times) will automatically have a piece of content (think a pdf) unlocked for them.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to accomplish this. I was thinking of using IFTTT.com, but they don't track how many times a bit.ly link has been clicked.

So steps would be the following:

1. Generate a new unique link to a given webpage
2. Track when that link has been clicked 3 times
3. Automatically send user an email when the link has been clicked 3 times with a link to unlocked content

Anyone have any ideas here? All I can think of is scraping bit.ly's stat page periodically and then seeing how often a link has been clicked, but that seems potentially quite slow and resource intensive.

Answer 1

You could host your own URL shortener that would take care of counting the clicks, then redirecting to bit.ly/whatever, emailing, etc.

For instance: http://yourls.org/

Edit: well, bit.ly seems to have a pretty nice API. Check http://dev.bitly.com/link_metrics.html#v3_link_clicks

Answer 2

The clicks API endpoint will tell you, but it's pull-based, not push, and there are API rate limits.